Should Dems throw Boehner lifeline?

Albert Camus, the great French existentialist writer, once wrote that “one should never indulge in useless lamentations over an inescapable state of affairs.” He was right, but America’s current shutdown debate is wacky enough for a bit of whimsy. So indulge me here: What if House Democrats pledged to support John Boehner as speaker?

Let’s start with a little truth telling: The problem with today’s Congress is its radical House Republicans. They constitute only a third of the GOP caucus, but, when combined with House Republicans who live in fear of a right-wing primary challenger, have the strength to hold Boehner hostage. They threatened to end his speakership if he permitted a House vote on the Senate budget bill, which had kept the health care law intact. “It would be devastating to the speaker’s support in the [Republican] conference” declared Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), a leader in the effort to defund Obamacare.

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These Republicans benefit from the “Hastert rule,” named after Dennis Hastert, who preceded Boehner as speaker. The informal directive holds that no speaker shall bring to the House floor any legislation not supported by a majority of the majority party’s members. It’s not a binding rule, but, if Boehner were to ignore it on a contentious bill, he would face a palace revolt.

Therein rests Boehner’s problem. If he wants to remain speaker, he must do the bidding of Congress’s radical members. Whether more backbone at the outset of his speakership would have tempered the power of his party’s radical wing is an open question. But it’s too late for that. They lead, he follows.

Should there be any doubt, one need only look back on the summer of 2011, when House radicals nearly forced the United States to default on its debt for the first time in history. Boehner had negotiated a grand compromise with President Barack Obama, only to back away when he found that he couldn’t sell it to his caucus.

What the House radicals ignore is that the majority party’s claim on the speaker’s position is based on tradition only. The Constitution does not entrust the speaker’s election to the chamber’s majority party. It says that the speaker shall be chosen by vote of all House members. Nothing in the Constitution would stop House Democrats from aligning with the chamber’s more moderate Republicans to keep Boehner in the speaker’s position. There are enough such Republicans — 20 would be enough — to make it happen.

It’s easy to blame Boehner and to suggest that he values the speakership more than he does the country. That’s a possibility, but not a certainty. He might think, as many political leaders before him have thought, that he can do more good in the long run by picking his battles rather than by going down in flames over a single issue and turning over the reins to Eric Cantor or someone even further to the right.

Democrats could be his regent. They could pledge to join with moderate Republicans to support his speakership if it were challenged on the floor by the radicals. Democrats could go further still and pledge not to field a candidate against him in the 2014 midterm elections, although, in truth, the bigger danger to Boehner’s reelection would be the GOP primary. Tea party activists, the Koch brothers and the rest of the radical right would be after his head.

Of course, there’s no reason to think that House Democrats would accept such an arrangement and plenty of reasons, including the egos of their party leaders, to think otherwise. Even if they were to agree, the fact that the proposal smacks of European parliamentary coalition politics would be fatal. Heaven knows, there’s nothing the Europeans can teach us about government.

Aside from the writings of Tom Paine, I cannot find any old-fashioned American support for the proposal, which has no historical precedent. Paine was concerned that Americans would come to see themselves as inheritors of governing structures rather than as framers of their constitutional system. If that came to pass, Paine argued, the American governing system would be sapped of its energy and flexibility. Well, it’s happened, and Paine’s diagnosis was correct.

Nevertheless, since this is a whimsical moment, let’s at least imagine what the House of Representatives might do if freed of the shackles of its right-wing minority. It wouldn’t play a dangerous game with the upcoming debt ceiling. It would replace sequestration with a thoughtful balance of spending cuts, and perhaps even modest revenue increases. It would take steps to give our sluggish economy a needed boost. It would correct some of the acknowledged defects in the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. If the Senate were to cooperate, the House would help fix our broken immigration system. It might even convince the American public that Congress is something other than a dysfunctional and broken branch of government.

These things are not too much to expect, but they are more than can be imagined — a tribute to the poverty of our imaginations. Then again, can we really blame the radical House Republicans for acting as they do? If we were in position to hold others hostage as a means of getting government to do our bidding, would we behave differently? Said Camus of his darker thoughts, “I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.”

Thomas Patterson is the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His latest book, Informing the News, will be published Oct. 8.